Charles van Commenee says he has never had any trouble dropping off at night. "Nothing keeps me awake," he said a few weeks before these Olympics. "I always sleep like a baby." One wonders if the UK Athletics head coach slipped off so easily on Friday. Great Britain are now all but certain to miss their Olympic target of eight medals and Van Commenee has said time and again that, if that happens, he will quit.

The man who orchestrated what soon came to be known as 'super Saturday', acclaimed by all as the greatest night ever in British athletics, may have talked himself out of a job. He will rue the cock-up committed by the men's 4x100m relay team, who, with depressing inevitability, were disqualified from an event in which they hoped to contend for a medal.

Van Commenee could have been up tossing and turning as he ran the permutations for the final 24 hours of athletics at these Games. But whichever way one cuts it, eight medals looks out of reach. Two fourth-place finishes on Friday evening, from Steve Lewis in the pole vault and the men's 4x400m relay quartet, brought the team tantalisingly close. Now, though, Great Britain can add two more at bestto their current total of five, with Mo Farah and the women's 4x400m quartet, who qualified third fastest, both running in finals on Saturday evening. After that the only chance left will be in the men's marathon and that is next to no chance at all.

It did not have to be this way. The men's 4x100m relay team of Christian Malcolm, Dwain Chambers, Danny Talbot and Adam Gemili were disqualified, yet again, for a sloppy changeover between their two young tyros on the last legs. Gemili set off too quickly was out of the changeover box when he took the baton. That blunder, the latest in a long line, will have infuriated Van Commenee. The men made a similar mess of it at the 2010 and 2012 European championships, as well as the 2011 world championships. Disqualified on each occasion, they seem incapable of running while holding a stick. Somehow it brings to mind Lyndon B Johnson's old line about Gerald Ford being "so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time". To make it worse, their finishing time would have put them through in third.

After their recent calamity at the European championships in Helsinki – "If you're going to make a mistake, you'd rather make a mistake here than in the Games," said Malcolm at the time – Van Commenee pointed out that in his native Holland "all the people think the relay team are a bunch of wankers because they drop the baton too often". The Dutch, for the record, qualified for the Olympic final in eighth. Van Commenee may have laughed it all off on that occasion but it is unlikely he was smiling this time, not when his job and his reputation depend on the ability of his team to eke the most out of every medal chance they have left at these Games.

On Friday night they could not quite do it. Lisa Dobriskey came 10th in a treacle-slow 1500m and her team-mate, Laura Weightman, was one place further back. It was a similar story in the women's 5,000m, where Jo Pavey and Julia Bleasdale finished seventh and eighth behind Ethiopia's Meseret Defar.

A proud man with strong principals, Van Commenee will feel obliged to stick to his word. Great Britain's athletics team could still finish with seven medals, which would be their most successful Olympics in a generation. And the man who plotted it could still be out of a job. "Absolutely," Van Commenee said just before these Olympics, when asked whether he wanted to recommit to his promise to quit. "It's quite simple. I'll tell you why. Because if I didn't, I'd lose my credibility. If I hold athletes and coaches accountable every day, how could I work over the next four years if I am not held accountable myself? It's a no-brainer. I never understand when people who have failed stay in jobs, as in politics and football."

This is a man, after all, who has repeatedly refused to apologise to Phillips Idowu, because he does not believe he should say sorry if he does not mean it. That idiotic spat is just one of the many things he has done that his critics will be willing to hold against him. And make no mistake anyone as outspoken as Van Commeneeis never short of enemies. It was not so long ago, for instance, that the Daily Mail was banned from all official UKA media activities because he objected to its campaign against the 'plastic Brits' on his team.

Then there was his decision to select Lynsey Sharp in the 800m. To accommodate her he had to leave out three more experienced runners in Jenny Meadows, Marilyn Okoro and Emma Jackson. That, too, looks a little rash now, given Sharp's naive performance this week, when she finished seventh in her semi-final.

But then the only people who never make mistakes are those who do not take decisions. There have been a host of good performances from younger athletes. Sophie Hitchon, the 21-year-old who says she wants to "put the glamour back in the hammer", broke the British record in the qualifying round for Friday night's final, where she finished 12th. That is just one piece of many pieces of evidence to support the consensus within the sport that Van Commenee has done a good job. And regardless of such things as delivery targets and performance ratios, you imagine the public will cherish the memory of the middle Saturday of these Olympics, when the team won three gold medals, more than almost any other they have of these Games.

"High expectations. High performances. No excuses," is Van Commenee's mantra. The trouble is it could leave UK Athletics in the surreal position of losing the most successful, if controversial, coach it has ever had.